The aim of our project was to tackle turning data into information that’s easy to digest and act upon. We set out to avoid screens that draw focus and create a prototype “calm” projected display for the data created by, for and about the people, products and services that can be found in and around the home.
How we did it.
We embedded a group of inanimate ornamental objects with RFID tags. Totems or avatars that represent either people, products or services. We also added RFID tags to a set of house keys and a wallet. Functional things that you carry with you. This group of objects combine with a set of shelves containing a hidden projector and RFID reader to become DisplayCabinet.
How it works.
By default DisplayCabinet shows a small ring of light on the table below. When an object is placed into the ring it expands to show the information relevant to the thing they represent.
Your house keys become an overview for your home. Energy consumed, current cost of energy per day, broadband allowance used and simple weather. It also serves as the screen that displays any scheduled alerts or important information relating to other items on the shelf. The bins need to be emptied and Mr Cuddles, the household pet is out and there’s something wrong with the fridge.
The fridge is showing that the temperature isn’t quite right and that the energy consumption is lower than usual. It’s also showing that the milk is low which could easily be based on the weight of the milk container in the fridge door. The message that the sausages go off tomorrow is really a hat tip to something that Chris Heathcote offered up recently in that services like Ocado print the sell by dates of the food you order on the receipt. This information is in a database somewhere so it’s no real stretch of the imagination to link that up to your fridge to create an internet fridge that doesn’t have a gigantic touch screen on the front of it.
Placing the little tube train on the table shows you the status of the tube lines…
and placing the bus on the table displays your local bus stops and the buses that are due to arrive.
Your wallet could display data from your online bank and show your balance, income, outgoings and combine that with data from your Oyster. Total balance, journeys made, stations visited and total distance covered.
Totems for people could show the location of their last geotagged tweet, comment, photo or check-in and show feeds from their social networks, which in this case is Twitter.
Results
It’s far from perfect but this is just the beginning. It’s sketching in hardware and I have a tiny confession to make. The information being displayed isn’t live but I really don’t think that matters because it’s very much an early prototype. A day one prototype even and the choices we made were based on actual data that could be taken from Pachube and other APIs. Given a bit more time, some additional hackery and a few asks this project would be pretty much fully functional.
I’m really happy that DisplayCabinet was received very well by the other hackers even though it’s a design hack and not a technical hack. It won a prize too. A GPRS router and a year of data courtesy of Arkessa! Not bad for your first hack day.
This is a big deal for the Internet of Things. It’s important because this is a step toward making this stuff simple enough to be in every home. A step in the right direction if you ask me.
I’ve been using a Current Cost Envi and Pachube to monitor my electricity consumption for a while now (It’s the basis of my Talking House project) but I have to admit connecting it up is a hassle that most people wouldn’t bother with. I have my Envi connected to a Mac Mini running a Processing script to push the data out to Pachube and then I route the data back from Pachube to some PHP running on my web server that talks to the Twitter API so that it updates me wherever I am. See what I mean?
This new Bridge device replaces the Mac Mini and Processing bit meaning that the hard work is dealing with the data once it’s in Pachube. That bit can be done by web developers so it opens up a world of possibility for using and displaying the data in meaningful, social ways. I hope we see people taking advantage of that to make the data easier to understand (and act upon) soon.
Porthole is an augmented reality application, powered by Pachube, that provides a view into the data environments hosted by Pachube. It overlays realtime sensor data on your camera view and enables you to query the current status of sensor environments.
I’ve been playing with Arduino and I have burns from my soldering iron to prove it. The end result is that I now have a talking house.
I built a light sensor “sentry”. He has an LCD display that he uses to communicate with the people around him and a network connection that effectively extends his ability to talk to anyone or anything that can connect to the Internet.
He’s not a very good listener - but that’s another project.
I gave him a sleep/wake up sequence so he says “good night” and goes to sleep if the light drops below a certain level or says “hello” and wakes up when the light comes back on again. I gave him a pain threshold so that if the light gets too bright it hurts him and he complains.
He sends his data out to Pachube so that I (or anyone else for that matter) can use the data he creates for other things.
I’ve got him connected to the private Twitter feed coming from my house. This feed is the aggregated sensor data (light, temperature and power consumption) from the sentry I made and a Current Cost Envi I have in my living room. There’s also the carbon footprint calculation coming from the Pachube Carbon Footprint calculator and my MSN status.
Whilst doing this project it’s become more than clear that Twitter is a great channel for smart objects to use to communicate with people and I know there’s a number of Twitter connectedobjects already but there’s something really interesting that happens psychologically when it’s your own house talking to you.
At the moment all the sensor data is aggregated into this single “voice” that I’ve called Home Unit 1 for the time being. It’s interesting that even though I know it’s the output of multiple distributed sensors it feels like it’s a single entity - and it became much more pronounced when I made the messages feel more human.
So my house talks and what is says appears alongside all the things my friends are saying. I can listen to my house from wherever I am that has a network connection.
This is great, but it raises some interesting questions.
Mainly that I’m not so sure if the single voice approach is a good thing or not. I think a house that appears to be run by an omnipresent robot like HAL might feel a bit threatening and I would like to try out individual feeds for each sensor to see if that feels a little less dominating - or just too noisy. I’m also going to experiment with the frequency of messaging and the language it uses to see how that affects things.
I’m sure there’s a sweet spot where it all feels quite natural and I have a feeling it lies somewhere close to the metaphor of a butler and servants in that the servants tell the butler everything but the butler only tells you when you really need to know something. You wouldn’t actively listen to the servants but if there was a problem you could bypass the butler and listen to what they were saying directly.
The concept of the talking house is fascinating. I wonder how this would scale. Talking houses or buildings being aggregated into talking streets, talking streets into talking boroughs and talking boroughs into talking cities, countries, continents etc.
Fascinating.
So anyway this is “sensing and talking”. The next step is “listening and doing” and I have no idea what I’m going to do yet - but I know it’s going to be great fun.
With any luck this graph should show the temperature of our living room over the last day.
This one should be the power consumption of our whole house.
It’s a visualisation of the 24 hours before you loaded this page created with the sensor data coming from a Current Cost energy monitor connected to my Mac Mini and reporting to Pachube.
The easiest way to describe Pachube is to say it’s a bit like Flickr or YouTube but instead of being for photos or videos it’s designed for real time sensor data. That may not mean much to you now but very soon there will be lots of “smart objects” like Current Cost available that are embedded with microprocessors and the ability to create and share their data over a network. These could be as simple as a light switch reporting when its switched on or off to personal informatics storing your GPS co-ordinates and heart rate to your music player storing listening preferences or complex sensor arrays that monitor and store heat, light, movement, sound, speed and all manner of other data types.
Some of these smart objects I’m talking about might also be capable of reading the data generated by other smart objects on the network - which means they could then become capable of acting on it. You could link them together and create networks of really useful things. Maybe the light in your office turns off automatically when you lock the door. Maybe your telephone can tell your hi-fi to turn down when it rings.
Objects could be designed specifically as simple physical interfaces to complex digital systems. A great example of this is the Skål media player interface.
Some of these things could even connect to the internet, access data available online and act on it too. For example your heating system could adjust itself based on the local temperature feed from a weather website or an object could make sounds or light to tell you something based on the content of your Twitter stream or an RSS feed.
A nice, simple example of this is Availabot, which is a physical display of whether or not your friend is available on iChat.
So here’s the good bit. If you have objects that can send their data off to the internet, and objects that can read data off the internet you can, in theory, put them together to do really incredible stuff. You could get objects talking to other objects and carrying out physical actions hundreds or thousands of miles away.
As you can imagine there’s a lot of buzz around this stuff. It’s often referred to as “the internet of things” and it’s pretty much unavoidable.
This is where Pachube comes in. It lets you hook your smart objects up to the internet allowing them to deposit data or suck it up regardless of their location. It doesn’t really care what creates the data or what reads the data - it’s essentially a data broker and is going some way to solve the problem of a common language for any networked objects we create. It has potential to allow the conversation between these things to be one to one, many to one or one to many too. Remember they don’t have to be small. They could range in scale from tiny to huge - meaning we could even see buildings or cities that are capable of reacting to data from any number of other smart objects of indeterminate scale or location. Privacy issues aside you could create things that respond to the data generated by thousands of similar objects in places all over the world. You could even combine different data types to make physical “mash ups” of data.
It’s still really young. There’s homebrew kits like Arduino and Phidgets that act as programmable gateways between the digital and physical spaces, allowing you to build your own smart objects and people have definitely been doing some really cool stuff with them. There’s some greatbooks out there too but I have to say it’s still all a bit nerdy and I’ve yet to see many people do anything genuinely useful with it (apart from maybe the highly amusing Botanicals project) but once people do come up with some killer applications for this kind of thinking - and they will - it’ll reach tipping point very quickly and it’ll be all over the place.
Personally I can’t wait to get involved working with stuff like this. I’ve started learning Processing (the language of Arduino) and intend to get stuck in as soon as I can.
- a device that takes the stress out of connecting their energy monitor to their new partner 
and Pachube to monitor my electricity consumption for a while now (It’s the basis of my 
